Sailing the seas of online marketing and plundering the riches as an affiliate pirate.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

How to Geotarget Ads on Your Website

Working with a single ad network is straightforward enough: you simply place their code on your website, and you're done. Things get a little more complicated if you are selling your ad space to advertisers directly, or when you want to geotarget your affiliate (or other) ads (in other words, show them only to visitors from certain countries). Geotargeting can drastically improve your profits, but is there an affordable solution for a small website or blog?

The answer is hosted ad managers which do all the work for you. There's lots of advantages to using a third party ad manager on a small website, the biggest one being that ad managing and geotargeting can use up quite a lot of CPU and RAM resources when you're hosting them on your own server or webhosting account.

So, how do ad managers work, exactly? You install the ad manager code on your website, and enter all the ads you have through the ad manager's admin panel. Simply put, now your ads aren't served directly, but rather through the ad manager's servers which can do all the nifty stuff like geotargeting for you.

Which ad manager to use? I've personally tried quite a few and ended up subscribing to AdSpeed. They have great support, easy-to-use interface, and affordable pricing (starting at $10 a month for 100,000 impressions). You can also try them for 10 days for free.

However, I did mention that I tried a few of them, didn't I? Perhaps some other ad manager would suit your needs better. I've published a short review of top 5 ad managers where I overview their pros and cons. Some of them will even let you use them for free (although with some limitations), so they're a good choice for even the smallest blogs which would benefit from some ad targeting capabilities.